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118 SHOFAR Winter 2000 Vol. 18, No.2 purpose of translation, better understanding of the Czech master's esthetic all have helped produce a "Kafka for the twenty-fIrst century." What readers and scholars needed was a "Gerchunofffor the twenty-fIrst century": a contemporary translation thattakes into account Gerchunoffs extensive linguistic and ideological revisions-there is a 1936 edition quite different from the original-as well as the controversies swirling around a book hailed as Argentine Jewry's "naturalization papers" and reviled as an accommodationist text. Closer to the Brod-Muir generation, Pereda provides a smoothly readable Gerchunoffbut rarely captures the author's tone, a kaleidoscopic mixture of archaic and modernist Spanish, transposed Yiddish, Yiddishized Hebraisms, and gaucho turns of phrase, as Gerchunoff strove to create a Spanish literary medium commensurate with the new Judeo-Argentine experience. There are likewise errors in the translation, and there is no consideration ofthe textual changes or the critical and political arguments. To have some form of Gerchunoff back in English print is better than noneStavans 's foreword gives relevant background information-but this is only a fIrst step. When a new, updated translation of Gerchunoffs classic appears, the circle will be complete. More successful is Joan Friedman's version ofAlicia Freilich's Claper(1987), the story ofan immigrant peddler-the quintessential door-klapper-and his Venezuelanborn daughter, who becomes more like him the more she tries to break away. The novel's polyphonic structure alternates the father's and daughter's voices, the immigrant and post-immigrant narrations, and Friedman captures the oral Yiddish rhythms ofone and the intellectual Spanish ofthe other. Her rendition makes clear that Freilich is truly Gerchunoffs successor, continuing to ponder the dilemmas of belonging and the linguistic challenges he confronted. Together with other Latin American Jewish writers increasingly available in English, these authors attest to Jewish communities and cultures that can no longer be ignored by the wider Jewish world. Edna Aizenberg Marymount Manhattan College Jewish Theological Seminary ofAmerica Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe, by Richard I. Cohen. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. 358 pp. $50.00. "Paganism sees its god, Judaism hears Him" (p. 6). As Richard I. Cohen stresses in the introduction to Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe, the one hundred and fIfty years since Heinrich Graetz made that comment have seen not only the expansion Book Reviews 119 of"art history" beyond the boundaries of(male) Christian Europe, but also the growing recognition that images have played an important role in many ofthe Jewish communities of the last two millennia. Through his analysis ofa series of images almost as unfamiliar to historians ofthe Jewish experience as to historians ofart, Cohen seeks a new approach, an "alternative entree into the social landscape ofEuropean Jewish society" between the medieval era and World War I (p. 9). Although earlier versions of four of the essays have already appeared in print, readers will find much here that is new, much to challenge and stimulate further research. Students of European (or, better, "European Christian") art are familiar with one sort ofJewish "icon"-the stereotypical "Jews" depicted as surrounding Jesus in scenes of trial and crucifixion. Much of Cohen's study concerns efforts (of sympathetic Christians as well as Jews) to redraw this icon, to display and thus demystify the ceremonies and family life of Jews to their Christian neighbors. That this is one ofthe important roles played by images is undeniable and undeniably poignant; nevertheless, as Cohen reminds us in his epilogue, the story he tells is more complex than this, involving as it does the role ofimages as signifiers in communities poised on the knife's edge between persecution and acculturation, the challenges of modernity, and the movement from displays of Judaica to displays of art by Jewish artists. Whether couched as attempts to erase the medieval icon of the Jew as "Christkiller " or as attempts to preserve a Jewishness threatened by the acculturation that accompanied emancipation, the common thread in Cohen's account remains his reading ofimages ofJews as signifiers of"Jewishness." Cohen's readings see images primarily as responses to pressures external to the Jewish communities for which the images...

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